Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.
On this day in 1492, Columbus landed on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. His trip was mainly about finding spices, especially pepper, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger. By sailing west, Columbus hoped to cut out the middlemen who tacked on hefty fees while transshipping the spices from the East Indies to Europe.
When Columbus was unable to find any spice merchants, he started looking for gold, since he was entitled to 10% of anything he found. Columbus made three later journeys, continuing to think he was in the East Indies until his death in 1506 at the age of 54.
The U.S. started celebrating Columbus day on October 12th in 1792. Our new country needed heroes, but Washington was still alive and Lincoln and Martin Luther King were far in the future. In 1892, President Harrison urged Americans to celebrate Columbus' landing. Rituals were established to inculcate children with love of country and belief in progress.
The first establishment of the day as a legal holiday was in 1907 in Colorado of all places. In 1934, FDR made Columbus Day a federal holiday. In 1971, the day of observance was moved to the second Monday in October to give postal workers a three day weekend.
Since then, there's been increasing pushback against naming a day after a man with such a controversial record. Native Americans especially resent that Columbus killed and enslaved so many of the Taino people he met in the Caribbean. About all that's left of the Taino is some DNA in the descendants of the peoples they intermarried with, mostly African slaves. Smallpox and other European diseases actually got most of them.
In 2016, Vermont started celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day on the former Columbus three day weekend. Oregon did the same the next year and South Dakota now celebrates Native American Day.
The funny thing is, Columbus never set foot on mainland North America. The first European we know about to visit North America was Leif Erickson. According to the Sagas, Erickson built a settlement in Newfoundland around 1000 A.D. The Indians were probably friendly at first like the Taino, but Erickson may have made demands they did not care to honor and he and his colonists were forced back to Greenland. By the way, Leif Erickson Day is October 9, beating Columbus once again.
Columbus succeeded where Erickson failed thanks to gunpowder. We shouldn't blame Columbus' excesses on gunpowder alone. The Chinese had had gunpowder for centuries, but they were content to stay home and set off fireworks.
Then there's Saint Brendan, the Irish monk, who, according to legend, travelled to America in the sixth century. Brendan had many adventures on his journey, my favorite being the time he and his crew landed on the back of a sleeping whale. They built a fire to cook lunch. When the whale got a whiff of this, the Irishmen were asked to leave the premises. Brendan didn't stay long in America. I think he just missed Ireland too much.
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I'm going to nit-pick here. Forgive me. Yes, indeed, the Chinese first entertained themselves with fireworks based on gunpowder; however, it didn’t take but a few hundred years before war applications became vogue – Tang Dynasty, about 904 A.D. The first gunpowder weapons in China were exploding spears and arrows. These weapons were followed by “rockets” that operated by putting small stone “cannonballs” inside bamboo tubes, and lighting gunpowder at one end. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. So, the Chinese stayed home (mostly) but went beyond playing with their fireworks. All that said, the bigger news is that the invention of gunpowder was a mistake. The alchemists who were playing with the three elements that made gunpowder were actually looking for an immortality elixir, but it (ahem) blew up in their faces, just like most of humanity’s fantasies of living forever.
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